Valentine’s Day slavery

 by Julianna Natali
With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, many students of St. James will be buying chocolate and flowers for their Valentine. But would you want to buy the chocolate if you knew the cocoa beans were harvested by child slaves?


CNN reporters David McKenzie and Brent Swails traveled to the heart of the Ivory Coast to do a follow up report on child slavery in the cocoa fields. In 2001, after a vast amount of news coverage about the unjust and unfair treatment of children, the chocolate industry was pressured into ending child labor in the fields.

Unfortunately law makers were not able to outlaw child labor in the fields, but the heads of the chocolate industry signed a voluntary protocol that declared the stopping of child labor as a “matter of emergency.” 10 years later, the issue is still as bad as it used to be, and it continues to get worse.

Although some of these children stay and work with their parents during their imprisonment, many are sold across borders and to neighboring towns .The price for one of these children is around 30 US dollars. More often than not, the parents are the ones to sell their children into slavery. Families in the Ivory Coast are so poor, and the economy is so bad that even if a child was promised payment, he won’t ever receive it. Aly

Diabate, a former child slave, said he was enticed into slavery with the promise of a bicycle and $150 if he worked for a year and a half.

Diabate said he never saw the money, and the closest he ever got to a bicycle was the chain he was beaten with.

40% of the world’s chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast, and a majority of its workers are children. Most begin working when they are toddlers, helping their parents extract the cocoa from the shell. These children do not go to school and many do not know how to read or write.

Because 40% of the world’s chocolate comes from Africa, there is a very good chance that every time you consume chocolate, you’re consuming tainted chocolate.

The sad part about this is the fact that these child slaves don’t even know what chocolate tastes like. Many don’t even know what the word chocolate means. They’re forced to work in horrible conditions in order to supply North American and European countries with chocolate. The big time industries that buy the cocoa from plantations claim to be ignorant to the problem and didn’t even recognize the existence of one until the unjust treatment was publicized.

Although corporations like CNN and MSNBC are investigating the child slavery in the Ivory Coast, Ivorian officials say without substantial evidence, nothing can be done to prevent it from happening. The public, however, can write to their favorite chocolate companies encouraging them to make sure their chocolate isn’t tainted. The public can also write letters to the White House or their state senators encouraging further investigation.

In time, this issue will go away and the child slaves will be returned to their home countries. Hopefully the cocoa plantations will be able to actually pay their workers and create a fair trade system.

This Valentine’s Day, when you’re at the grocery store buying your loved one their favorite candy, I hope you think about the slave children who worked for nothing in order to make that chocolate as delicious as it is.